University of Denver professor Lucy Marsh on Tuesday filed a charge of discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that Sturm College of Law violated federal law by paying her less than a man in a similar job and failed to correct the inequity when it had the chance.

DU spokeswoman Kim DeVigil declined to comment on the filing. “We do not discuss active complaints, nor do we discuss confidential personnel information.”

The filing comes a month after the EEOC, the agency responsible for enforcing federal anti-discrimination laws, marked the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act by prioritizing pay discrimination as one of the six top issues of the next three years.

According to the EEOC, in 2012 women in general earned 77 percent of what men made, and at the current rate of progression, the gender wage gap will not close until 2057.

“What I hope comes out of this is not just fair compensation to professor Marsh and to fix the system, but hopefully there will be lessons learned that other universities, law schools and employers can look at and say, ‘This is something that we can look at, to make sure the women are not paid less for equal work,’ ” said Jennifer Reisch, one of Marsh’s lawyers and legal director of Equal Rights Advocates, a national civil rights organization.

According to the Tuesday filing, the charge of discrimination arises from the “stark inequality between the salaries of male and female full professors” at Sturm College of Law. According to the filing, Marsh is the lowest paid professor, earning $109,000 per year, compared with the median full-professor salary of $149,000.

“Professor Marsh believes that she and other female professors at the law school were discriminated against with respect to compensation because of their gender and were paid less than men performing substantially equal work under similar conditions in the same establishment,” the filing says.

Documents filed in the case include a December 2012 memo from Dean Martin Katz to the faculty about the allocation of funds for law-school pay raises.

He said the funds, received as part of the university-wide Faculty Salary Competitiveness Initiative designed to attract and retain top academic talent, would be given to the top 25 performers at the school, with the goal of getting them closer to their competitive target salaries.

In a section on gender-based salary equity, he said this round of raises “were applied ‘without regard to trying to correct potential inequities.’ “

The memo showed that the wage gap for full-time professors widened further after the recent raises. It said the median salary for female full-time professors was $7,532 a year less than for males before this round of raises and $11,282 a year less than that for men after this round of raises. The mean salary for female full-time professors was $14,870 a year less than that for men before this round of raises and $15,859 a year less than for males after this round of raises.

“I was absolutely shocked to see that discrepancy and that blatant admission of discrepancy and to see it is getting worse,” Marsh said in a phone interview.

According to documents in the case, after Katz announced that the university had earmarked funds for law school faculty raises, Scales expressed concerns about gender inequity in faculty salaries and asked that the additional funds be used to remedy any inequities.

Scales’ inquiries in spring of 2012 began mildly but escalated when Katz declined to respond to her request for reassurances there was no gender inequality at the law school, Marsh said.

She got “a bit more fiery,” Marsh said, because pay equity “is not something done out of consideration. It’s the law.”

Scales died in June 2012 from massive brain trauma after falling down the stairs at her home.

“I thought that in her honor I would continue her crusade and make sure to get an answer,” Marsh said.

Although Marsh had detailed her concerns and asked for specific data on faculty salaries in an e-mail to Katz before that meeting, documents filed with the EEOC say Katz “was unwilling to give Prof. Marsh much of the information she requested, did not know her starting salary or her DU target salary, and presented incorrect information regarding (her) start date and publications.”

He did, however, tell her that she was the lowest paid professor on the faculty.

Marsh’s current salary is $109,000. Katz said her competitive target salary is $181,000.

“I was very, very surprised,” Marsh said. “At the end of the meeting, I asked what he was going to do about it, and he said, ‘nothing.’ ”

She felt something had to be done.

“I decided I would be the best one to bring litigation or turn the spotlight on this because I have a very strong teaching record, and I’m not just starting my career,” Marsh said.

Marsh, the daughter of Thompson Marsh, a respected DU law school professor, is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School. Her professional experience includes working for Dale Tooley at the Denver District Attorney’s office 1976-79 and serving on the Colorado Real Estate Commission from 1977-82, appointed by former Gov. Richard Lamm.

At DU, she teaches classes in trusts and estates and civil procedure, and she recently started the Tribal Wills Project, supervising students drafting wills pro bono on the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain reservations in Colorado. This program is an extension of the Wills Lab, a clinical program she created nearly 30 years ago in which law students work with practicing attorneys to draft wills for low-income clients.

“Most people would be astonished that it would be possible for someone of her caliber and commitment to be the worst paid of the full-time professors at the school,” Reisch said.

Baine Kerr, a Boulder lawyer who also represents Marsh, said that they tried to remedy the wage equity issue before filing the discrimination charge but received no response from DU.

“We are skeptical that there are actual justifications,” he said, “both because of the apparently systemic … character of the discrepancies and because if there were actual justifications, we would have heard about them.”

As for Marsh, she’s prepared for a tough road.

“You are taking a risk with something like this,” she said. “They will try to point out everything I have ever done wrong. I think they will come up empty-handed. But I was a litigator once, and I know they try to tear people apart.”

If you have questions about equal pay, or need advice on a situation related to unequal pay at work, you can call the free advice service at Equal Rights Advocates, the national nonprofit legal organization at 800-839-4ERA or visit the website: equalrights.org/legal-help